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A week ago, in the context of a discussion on some NYT article, @2rafa commented that “there is an unstated (on the progressive side) premise among all people that casual sex is a bad deal for women and devalues or dishonors them in some way”. It generated a few replies but basically no further discussion, even though I’m sure it’s worthy of further discussion, and here’s why: as far as I’m aware, it’s certainly not the case that progressives had this attitude from the beginning of the Sexual Revolution, which is what the context is here. Obviously they used to have a different view in general, but sometime along the way, they changed their minds, because things turned sour, essentially.
Before continuing I think it’s important to qualify, as 2rafa also did, that other ideological groups also share this basic view, but the two main differences are that right-wingers tend to state this view openly, whereas progs are usually reluctant to do so, and that they do so on religious and moralistic grounds, whereas progs concentrate on women’s individual long-term interests, not on any other considerations.
So anyway, I said to myself: surely these people, being progressives, believe that the Sexual Revolution, while a laudable event, went haywire at some point, and didn’t bear the fruits it was supposed to. And I can tell that this is a relatively widespread view, because I can see it expressed in various online venues all the time, not just this forum.
What went wrong then? What did the Sexual Revolution basically promise to average progressive women, and why did that turn out to be a lie?
I’d argue that the more or less unstated promise of the Sexual Revolution to young single women was that: a) they will be sexually free without inviting social shame i.e. normalized sexual experimentation and promiscuity on their part will not have an unfavorable long-term effect on men’s attitudes towards them, and women will not sexually shame one another anymore b) they will be able to leave their constrictive gender roles to the extent they see fit, but this will not lead to social issues and anomie because men will be willing to fill those roles instead i.e. men will have no problem becoming stay-at-home dads, nurses, kindergarteners, doing housework etc.
And none of that turned out to be true.
Am I correct in this assessment?
The problem here is once again that humans are manifestly not equal, some people are better than others at certain tasks, and those that are better will always be able to exploit a situation for personal utility more than those who are worse. This is fine. The issue begins when society notices these differences and starts meddling to try and reduce the gap between the high and the low, imposing large costs on everyone and in general making everything worse.
Some people are quite capable of not getting emotionally attached through casual sex, these people by and large tend to be either psychopaths or high decouplers. I'm going to ignore the psychopaths for the rest of this post. If you have two high decouplers who have mutually agreeable no strings attached sex with each other and then go their separate ways then no damage has been done to either of them while they're both better off. And since these are high decouplers we're talking about you don't get any residual damage through "alpha widowing" etc. to whoever they eventually settle down with, a high decoupler woman can separate out the two things and doesn't confuse the calibre of person they can get for short term stuff vs a comitted relationship and a high decoupler man doesn't mind settling down with a high decoupler woman who slept around because he can be secure in her promise of commitment to him without regard to whoever she slept with before.
However if you are a low decoupler (like the majority of people) then casual sex has a massive cost on your psyche if you are female, men are comparatively protected because of their innate id's desire to sleep around, but even then, looks fade and as a man you'll eventually lose your ability to get what you were able to get in your youth, and this realisation, or refusal to accept this change, can seriously damage you and by extension, the people you are close to at that time, when you come to terms with it. In this case you get those famous graphs of how eventual divorce rate/cheating risk/marital dissatisfaction rate goes up with partner count. Such people should absolutely avoid casual sex, considering it as a drug no different from cocaine or heroin.
The optimal version of the advice society gives is probably something like:
This here would be a far superior version of dating norms to have over the current "as long as everyone consents, go wild!". Unfortunately it requires acknowledgeing that some people are better suited to benefit from sleeping around as they are innately better at mitigating the potential costs, therefore the optimal amount of sleeping around for them to do is higher than the optimal amount of sleeping around for someone who's likely to feel the costs more acutely, and so modern western society will never acquiesce to it, preferring instead for the low decouplers to perpetually suffer (or if things get real bad, force everyone, including high decouplers, into restrictive social norms) rather than acknowledge that there is a difference between the high and the low.
And before you ask, I consider myself as a high decoupler who does not sleep around, mostly as a matter of principle. I've had rationalist type people tell me in the past I'm just hurting myself (and I agree with them to an extent) and I should let loose, even suggesting mutual acquaintances they were sure I would be able to bed. However my upbringing instilled very strongly in me that by virtue of my high station in life I have an obligation to act as a role model for the rest of humanity, and sleeping around for personal pleasure is really not being a good role model when you consider the destructive effects it has for most people long term.
This presupposes that decoupling is actually a good thing, and that "high decouplers" are better off because they can decouple sex from anything meaningful.
Sex is a very powerful tool, and decoupling it from anything it can harm might be better than recklessly destroying your life with it, but it also decouples it from anything it could be used to build.
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Which also requires honesty on the part of the person asking that question; a low-decoupler who just wants to have sex damn any other principles (self-respect, religious beliefs, etc.) might force themselves into emulating a high-decoupler and be damaged later because they didn't fully understand or were lying to themselves about who they actually were.
(Which is how low-decouplers mentally model, and justify marginalizing, native high-decouplers in the first place. By contrast, high-decouplers don't understand what "taking damage" in this way because they literally can't.)
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Replace "sleeping around" with basically anything that is both risky and potentially rewarding. Some people will be better at learning to ski than others because of a combination of body type/composition and personality. Others will be better soldiers, firefighters, BASE jumpers, etc.
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I'm skeptical of the difference between high and low decouplers. I'd say high decouplers probably just repress their emotions well, but haven't looked into it.
Is there psychological literature on decoupling as a personality trait?
(Disclaimer: I wrote this before I read the articles in the sibling comment to this one.)
I self-test regularly; I know what I am, and what I am not.
(There are a bunch of weird side-effects that I've noticed in addition to this, and it inherently makes social interaction more difficult since "be normal" is not a free action to anywhere near the same degree that it is for others. But I've known this to be true for as long as I can remember to the point where I'm pretty sure it's something you're born with- some people are capable of both developing the emulation layer you need to function successfully and becoming properly aware it's just emulation, and some are not. I think we call those capable of neither "low-functioning" these days.)
I think there's a difference between a low-decoupler wishing they were a high-decoupler, and a native high-decoupler, and it can be difficult even for people who are high-decouplers to know which is which, especially because people who aren't native can still express native traits (by confusing the sum of a bunch of traits for being a high-decoupler in a particular area, by being overwhelmed with some emotion like lust, etc.) only to find out that actually, no, they aren't and now they're bad or tainted forever or something.
Plus, having enjoyed the fruits of being a high-decoupler can create trust issues when interacting with low-decouplers later even if no other risks manifest themselves, so...
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So the idea behind high/low decoupling comes from this post here:
https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2014/06/09/do-rationalists-exist/
That link has a lot of references at the bottom of the article with psychological studies, but reading the article itself should give a decent idea. Cognitive Decoupling is a well defined thing, it seems to be Keith Stanovich who came up with the idea in the first place two decades ago, he has book chapters like: http://www.keithstanovich.com/Site/Research_on_Reasoning_files/Stanovich_West_Toplak.pdf which discuss the idea (but are quite long to read and mostly of interest to people in the field, they aren't written for a general audience)
This article builds upon that idea, applying it to the Harris Kelin spat a few years ago:
https://everythingstudies.com/2018/04/26/a-deep-dive-into-the-harris-klein-controversy/
It's a bit long but a good read.
If you want stuff more directly relevant these are good:
https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/8fnch2/high_decouplers_and_low_decouplers/
https://drossbucket.com/2018/04/08/the-cognitive-decoupling-elite/
Note that high decoupling isn't the same as high IQ. The two are highly correlated, but that's not the same as being identical.
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